Recruited To Play For The Homestead Grays
At 6-foot 3-inches and 220 pounds (100 kg), Fields played quarterback at Virginia State University in Petersburg but left school when he was recruited to play for the Washington Homestead Grays in 1939.
The Grays were one of the finest teams in the Negro League, winning nine league championships before folding in the wake of desegregated professional baseball. The Grays played many of their home games at the old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. and some in Homestead, a neighborhood of Pittsburgh. After Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and broke the color line in Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues began to struggle.
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Famous quotes containing the words recruited, play and/or homestead:
“No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
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“These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
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